// Posts Tagged ‘art’

In 2011 the artist Carlos Motta launched the ambitious project We Who Feel Differently – an exhibition, homepage, book, and e-journal – that addresses things at stake in contemporary queer and LGBT politics across the world. The project includes, among other things, interviews with fifty activists, academics and artists from Columbia, South Korea, Norway, and the US, and is as such a treasure trove for all of us who are engaged in transnational exchange on questions pertaining queer political ideas, struggles, and dreams.

In May 2012 Motta takes We Who Feel Differently to New York where The New Museum will function as a “hub” for further debates and discussions related to the project. I have had the pleasure of being invited to participate in a two day We Who Feel Differently: Symposium, organized by Motta and Raegan Truax at The New Museum on May 4-5.

I will give a presentation entitled “Queer Preposterousness: We Who Feel Temporally Disoriented” on Saturday 5th, addressing the theme of that day on queer memory, art, and politics. For those who cannot come to the event, all the previous interviews, texts, and material related to We Who Feel Differently is available online, and that will keep you occupied for quite some time…

The Venice Biennial is coming up, and I’ve been fortunate to be invited to join Andrea Thal’s important queer and anti-racist project at the Swiss Pavillion entitled “Chewing the Scenery.”

The website for the project is just up, and I’m really looking forward to see Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz’s new works “No Future” and “No Past” which together with Tim Zulauf/KMU Produktionen’s installative dramatization “Deviare – Vier Agenten – Part of a Movie” will be presented at Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice. The project also includes a book and a seminar. The Chewing the Scenery-book includes contributions by fantastic theorists and artists such as Antke Engel, Ann Cvetkovich, Patricia Purtschert, Rubia Salgado, Uriel Orlov, Eran Schaerf, Maria Iorio/Raphaël Cuomo, and others. The seminar in September will feature many of these people together with among others the queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman.

I have written a text in the book, and will give a lecture at the seminar in September. My article is entitled “Simultaneously: Queer Politics – All At Once.” My text takes the song “Simultaneously” by the queer disco group MEN as a starting point to discuss queer temporalities, erotic historiographies, AIDS, prognosis time, chronopolitics, simultaneity, state racism, white supremacy, colorblindness, racial silence, gay imperialism, and the need for queer politics to deal with all at once.

The fantastic artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz has just released a new book about their work entitled Temporal Drag(Hatje Cantz, 2011). The book includes articles and documentation of their collaboration – covering material on works like Normal Work (2007), N.O. Body (2008), Salomania (2009), and Contagious (2010).

I’m really happy that my article “Disruptive Anachronisms: Feeling Historical with N.O. Body” is included in this beautiful book, where it stands side by side with essays by among others the fantastic queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman, queer film theorist Marc Siegel, and art theorist/writer Diedrich Diederichsen. The book also includes a conversation with the artist by the great artist-curator Andrea Thal. For those who prefer reading things in French, all texts are translated.

Since the distribution of the book have been rather marginal, at least outside of Sweden, I have just made the text available here on my new homepage (designed by CYF). So, for all you Norwegian readers out there – here is my thoughts on the “Perfekte sammenbrudd” in Elmgreen and Dragset’s The Collectors.

I have written an article on the French/Danish artist Al Masson‘s installations which is published in the anthology Talende bilder: Tekster om kunst og visuell kultur (Bergen: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2010). The article is entitled “Et dykk ned i følelsesarkivet: Al Massons reiseobjekter,” which in English would read something along the lines of “Delving Into the Archive of Feelings: Al Masson’s Travel(ing) Objects”.

In the article I perform an extended reading of Al Masson’s installations of and performances with found plastic objects, focusing especially on his fantastic exhibition Magasin (2008). In order to find a language for my erotic investment in Masson’s fragile and ephemeral plastic assemblages, I turn to affect theory and queer theory – from Tomkins to Deleuze/Guattari, Ernst van Alphen to Ann Cvetkovich.

The text deals with desire in art encounters as well as scholarly work; it discusses bad (or, rather, perversely good) object-choices and the erotics of queer archives – following up my writings on these matters in Lost and Found. Masson’s work is something to look into: here is a taste of one of his objects: